


in view

by Kypros



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Blow Jobs, Developing Relationship, Emerging Sexualities, Feelings Realization, Implied/Referenced Sex, M/M, Mutual Pining, Post-Season/Series 03, University, boys figuring out feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-10
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:40:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26937529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kypros/pseuds/Kypros
Summary: Jonathan listens to Steve's voice and hears home in each syllable, listening too hard for the hint of anything else without hearing what he wants, and doesn't catch any of the content. He supposes it doesn't matter, anyways. Nothing is resolving into the pictures he takes the way he wants them to, nothing matching up to the words he sees dancing around in his head. It’s just sharp feelings and unfinished sentences, moments he can see that need to be arranged carefully, but can’t quite be captured by his camera yet.Steve should have never kissed him.
Relationships: Jonathan Byers/Steve Harrington
Kudos: 49





	in view

**Author's Note:**

> The tag has been so dry lately and I'm parched.

Three weeks into the first semester, the girl who sits in front of him in every photographic composition lecture turns around in her seat after class and leans over to talk to him. She’s a pretty sweet-natured girl who has an unfortunate taste in sweaters and he’s fairly sure she’s been working up the courage to do it over the last week and a half.

“Um. So, have you started on your narrative photo assignment yet? Oh, and I’m Wanda by the way.” She blushes, smiling shyly and holds out her hand. Jonathan takes it, shaking it lightly, and tries his hardest not to make that weird face he sometimes does when meeting someone new and gives her a half nod. She’s cute, he thinks, and she twirls her hair nervously around one finger, the same soft strand pulling over her milk-sallow skin again and again.

“Sort of,” he answers and begins to walk past her down the stairs out of the lecture hall, the girl following just a few steps behind. “But sort of not. I don’t know yet. I won’t know for a while.” He’s not being rude, it’s just how his brain works sometimes when trying to take photos—when he's trying to make sense of how something should _look_ , but as he takes a few steps more, he realizes she’s no longer right behind him. He thinks over what he just said and how he said it, and he can’t help but to turn around, looking to her expression, really looking, and even cares a little when he realizes he thinks he may have hurt her feelings.

“I’m sorry,” he says quickly. Then, changing the subject, trying to come off as a little warmer, says: “Hey, you remind me of someone from back home.” He flashes her small sincere smile, and sees her melt.

“Really?” There’s pleasure in her voice, laced by a small hint of excitement. “A good someone, I hope.”

“Yeah,” he answers honestly, “Definitely.”

This time it’s her turn to walk past him out the door and he can almost see the spring in her step. The girl—Wanda—is so naïve and it strikes him how very apt the reminder is: the spitting image of a young Nancy Wheeler and what he’s left behind him now. And like a sixteen year old Nancy, this girl is still at the stage where she thinks it’s the good that people want, the _normal_ , but desire works in strange and terrible ways.

—

The student cafeteria is always one or two people short of deserted this time of night. Jonathan likes it here, likes the eerie emptiness of the shuttered outlets, laminate tables wiped clean, a ghost of it’s daytime chaos. Every once in a while when he needs to think or to work through some of the photos he’s been taking (when his thoughts _finally_ begin to align with the photos he’s developed, that’s when he works best), Jonathan comes down here to the guts of the student center in the dead of the night and just scribbles away on his notepad while flipping through film negatives until things seem clearer in his head, or until he falls asleep and one of the members of the janitorial staff has to nudge him awake to shoo him away. He doesn’t like his room that much and it’s far too small for being basically an oversized closet in which two disparate strangers have been forced to share (his room mate, Clint, even with his busy football training schedule, has very little sense of how to put things away, a taste for bad country music, and no discernible personality that Jonathan can fanthomably imagine).

Lately, however, he’s been down in the cafeteria for too many nights in a row. Steve called him for the first time since he left for school, seven weeks and two days since he, his family, and all of Will’s friends saw him off at the Greyhound station. Steve had been elected as a secondary chauffeur, unwittingly dragged into carting a car full of noisy boys across town while Joyce enjoyed the privilege of riding with the quieter girls. His brother had made a large going away banner and the young teens had unfurled it as the bus lurched out of the station— _Goodluck, Jonathan!—_ and waved in earnest, chasing the tail end of exhaust fumes and dry summer dust. His mother too had followed the bus with an enthusiastic wave. It was only Steve who remained a background player, arms crossed as he leaned against the side of the building. It was only at the last minute, as the bus careened left and out of the parking lot did his hand offer a small, solidarity wave.

Now Jonathan listens to his voice and hears home in each syllable, listening too hard for the hint of anything else without hearing what he wanted, and didn’t catch any of the content. Something about plans for Thanksgiving and asking if he was coming home at Christmas. It didn’t matter anyways and it screwed him up for the rest of the week, thinking about what they still weren’t talking about, and more—what Jonathan can’t bring himself to say.

His first photographic composition assignment is due in three days and maybe it’s foolish to try and process so much about Steve and the last six months into his photography so soon, but nothing is resolving into the pictures he takes the way he wants them to, nothing matching the words he sees dancing around in his head. It’s just sharp feelings and unfinished sentences, moments he can see that need to be arranged carefully, but can’t quite be captured by his camera yet. Instead, his fingers cramp up time after time and refuse to stay steady on the shutter release, sending him reeling into further frustration.

“I’ve seen you around.”

A voice breaks into Jonathan’s head, fucking up another unsuccessful attempt at trying to make sense of the weird array of photos he’s taken, startling him to look up. It’s a stranger, long and lean, with blond hair and smiling eyes. Jonathan’s seen him around too, one of the others who use the cafeteria for its peace and quiet in the dead of night, but before everyone left everyone else alone in an unspoken, but readily acknowledged agreement. This stranger has broken that agreement. Jonathan’s flippant answer rolls off his tongue as a startled reaction, harsh in it’s lonely quiet.

“What about it?” Oh yeah, he’s been making friends _all_ over campus with his attitude and general friendliness, but it doesn’t seem to put the stranger off. Instead, he swings a leg over the bench connected to the cafeteria style table and sits astride it, facing Jonathan as he leans forward. He's so close that Jonathan can see the freckles scattered across his nose, the caramel flecks almost invisible and melting into his olive hued skin.

“What are you working on?” he asks. “I mean I’ve seen you around here almost every other night, hunched over your notebook.”

“Just...some photography stuff," Jonathan responds neutrally with. He closes the notebook with the scribbled words over his hand, shuffling the few photos he had splayed on the table in with the paper, a nervous reaction. He doesn’t like people seeing what he’s captured until all of it makes _sense._ “An assignment, actually.”

The older boy raises one eyebrow.

“You don’t seem like the studious type. Pulling so many all-nighters over school work? You must be a really serious photography major.”

“Photojournalism,” Jonathan shoots back in reply, feeling the same irrational pride he gets every time he says it, defying expectations.

The boy just shrugs, looking away before he suddenly smiles, asking Jonathan: “But it’s the photography part that you love, right? Or you wouldn’t be working so hard on this. It’s what you want to do.”

It’s not a question, as if the stranger knows he’s right about him. It’s a little irritating and Jonathan is about to snap something to the effect to get rid of him when the guy slides even closer along the bench, almost surrounding Jonathan with his wide-spread legs. Then he says very casually, as if their denim-clad knees weren’t touching each other, “So, are you good at it? Photography, I mean?”

Jonathan knows the answer to this one, the right one, and the one he likes to say.

“Does it matter if I am? If I love it?”

The guy shakes his head, tapping his fingers on Jonathan’s knee in a syncopated beat, then drums his fingers in a quick scale upwards on the same spot.

“Uh-huh,” he says. “My thing is drawing. Want to see?” He doesn’t wait for Jonathan to answer and instead pulls out a notebook, a similar black-covered sheepskin journal from his messenger bag and flips it over expertly to the last page. It’s a pretty good likeness of himself, in pencil, complete. Jonathan looks at the picture for a while and he almost admits that he’s only ever once tried to photograph someone with the same precision and detail and effort.

“I’m flattered,” he eventually says in the end, only a moment before he thinks the silence is going to sound awkward.

“Good,” the guy says, and then he deliberately places one hand on the back of Jonathan’s neck, just below his ear. “So can I kiss you?”

The question; the hand on his neck—there’s too much memory in the act—but Jonathan goes along with it anyway, a little part of his mind almost smug with the knowledge that a complete stranger was so completely and utterly into him. He follows the guy all the way to his room (a single—he’s an R.A in Jonathan’s dorm, but not on his floor, thank fuck), and it’s not until the stranger has one hand down the front of his jeans that Jonathan thinks to ask: “Shit, I never...who are you—what’s your name?”

“Danny,” the guy says and Jonathan just nods, watching as he slides his jeans down his legs and pushing them off the bed and onto the floor in a singular practiced move. Jonathan sobers up a little then, raising himself up on his elbows to watch, feeling almost detached from his own seduction.

“You’ve ever done this before?” Danny asks when he notices the hesitation on Jonathan’s face.

 _Yes,_ his brain sings. _Very emphatically_ , _yes, with an exclamation mark and a shitload of guilt._

“No,” Jonathan says instead, even dragging it out a little, enough to make it sound convincing. Seconds later his hips wriggle closer to Danny, impatient and giving him away. Danny just laughs and ducks his head low, lips pressing against skin, no more questions asked, no more questions answered, not for tonight.

—

He doesn't go home for Thanksgiving and there's a message left on his answering machine from Steve–a quick, _Hey, are you coming back for Christmas?_

He does, but he doesn't tell Steve this. There's even a party where he's supposed to be at; some low-key shindig taking place at the Wheeler's house with punch and chips and readily accessible alcohol that's all too easy for the kids in the basement to slip away with. But it all seems so familiar, so jarringly _wrong_ that he avoids the offer of invitation from Nancy with an excuse of how he's not feeling so great ( _My mom's cooking is still the same as ever_ , he grimaces), but they'll have to grab lunch together in the next few days before he makes the long trip back to New York City via the bus.

So he doesn't go to the party and most days home are spent taking long trips driving around the countryside or trekking through the woods, boots filling up with snow. He goes through almost six canisters of film by the time the week is up and Will harangues him into binge watching all the old Rankin stop-motion Christmas films one evening— the ones they used to watch as kids—so by and by, it's not a bad trip home, just not the one he expected.

There's a boy, too. Some kid named Peter that he used to work with at _The Hawk_. They run into each other one afternoon outside the grocery store, both sent on last minute errands by their mothers' for canned cranberry sauce for Christmas dinner.

He meets up with Peter three more times before the week is out. Sometimes just for a few quick moments, sometimes for the afternoon. When Saturday rolls around, Peter laughs and smiles and tells him it's been fun.

"Just like back in high school, huh?" he says.

"Sort of," Jonathan agrees. Because it's not just quick kisses that are messy and awkwardly stolen in the broom closet behind the concession stand anymore. There's a stain darkening the crotch of his jeans and a sticky smear of something wet clinging to the hem of Peter's shirt.

"You heading back to school tomorrow?" Peter asks, laughing at Jonathan’s answer.

"Yeah," Jonathan responds, but doesn't offer to expound upon the subject any further.

"Well have a good semester, eh Byers?" Peter tells him genially. "It was nice catching up."

And it was.

—

It’s a very bad, no good day from the start when the past starts catching up with him. All those feelings he tried to work out? The pictures in his head that he couldn’t quite capture? It all bubbles up and spills out in a period of twenty-four hours, which isn't _fair_ because he's spent so long trying make sense of things and now is not the time for reality to rear its ugly head.

Jonathan’s late to his first class in the photolab, which only has five other people in it, so he can’t hide the fact that he slips in close to 25 minutes past 8. There’s also a surprise quiz in his journalism ethics class he’s sure he failed, and no matter how much he tries, all his photographs lately are turning out like shit. They all come out unfocused, blurry, and detached from their subject matter and he knows it’s because he feels the same way in his head. He’s given up on the photo essay he wanted to do about Steve, given up on understanding the confusion in his head, but it’s been the only thing he’s tried to capture with his camera in the last six months that's felt alive in his mind.

He barely makes it to the end of the day awake and as he walks back to the dorm as the sun is setting, the glaring, glassy whites of the New York City skyline blinding him with each step, all he can think about is crawling into his bed to sleep. He’s so out of it that as he chucks his sneakers into the corner of his room and is about to pull off his jeans, he almost doesn't notice that the pile of blankets crumpled on his bed is breathing. He pokes at it warily, afraid to find a drunk Clint sleeping in the wrong bed again, and Steve sleepily rolls over, uncurling himself from under the sheets.

“Shit!” Jonathan yells, startled. “What the hell are you _doing_ here?”

“Your roommate let me,” Steve mutters, voice raspy and low. “I can’t believe you went to all your classes today. I’ve been waiting for you for six fucking hours, man.”

“I mean, why are you here? How did you get here?

Steve shrugs and buries himself deeper into the bed. Jonathan catches, ' _quit my job, dad’s a fucking asshole, drove all last night',_ all murmured into the pillow.

“Well, I want to sleep like the dead, so move your ass onto the floor, alright?”

Jonathan’s not in the mood for any of this. But Steve, with his sleepy-lidded eyes and smirk on that generous mouth, just throws open the covers and pats the little space left on the bed beside him. Steve’s not wearing a shirt; he’s not wearing anything but his underwear. This is a test, Jonathan thinks. A challenge. Jonathan closes his eyes and seethes, and wants, and remembers. The last time they were in a bed together was over a year ago, after that party, and what a way to end and start the year. Kisses and a dirty drunken albeit hot blowjob; that moment of peace before he woke up and their acquiesced friendship became bent, if not broken. Steve just squeezes closer, turning on his side towards Jonathan, and Jonathan just sighs.

When he finally wakes up, it’s dark outside except for the streetlights and Steve is dressed and sitting at the foot of his bed, head cocked.

“Hey, I was worried you were never going to wake up,” he says, reaching out pushing the hair out of Jonathan’s face, just once and quickly. “Your roommate says there’s a party over in block D that we should check out.”

Jonathan, still a bit groggy, pulls on a shirt and stumbles out of the room after Steve. Clint is in the hallway, leaning against the wall. As Jonathan walks past, Clint mutters, “Were you two in bed together when I came in?”

“You tell me, I was asleep,” Jonathan counters and pushes past him roughly. There’s less than a month to the end of the winter semester and Jonathan’s already put in his request for a room switch for next year. The panic that used to swell in his stomach whenever there was the slightest hint of people realizing he wasn’t completely straight seems to have dissolved into a pool of apathy over time. And Clint? Well, he’s not worth the angst and Jonathan doesn’t give a shit what a stupid, brain-dead meathead thinks.

The party is like any other he’s ever bothered to attend half-heartedly since starting college. Drugs and sex and alcohol are freely available if you hit up the right people and it’s just like highschool, except Jonathan doesn’t have to pretend that he’s actually interested in being here just to fit in. He greets some guy from his American lit class, smiles fakely at some girl who talks to him about the latest photography assignment in their composition class, sits uncomfortably next to a complete stranger and has a stop-start conversation of awkward faces and silences that should pretty much kill any hope the girl has left in her heart. Worse, he can’t see Steve anywhere, but he’s pretty sure if he checked one of the beds behind the closed doors, he’d find him making out with a willing participant with low self-esteem and the same desire as he does to simply just get off.

He’s half passed out on the couch in the corner of the room when he feels cold fingers on his neck and a body slides down beside him, limbs askew.

Steve is there, cheeks ruddy, and Jonathan almost sighs.

“Tired of it all by now?” Steve asks, and Jonathan doesn’t know who he’s talking to, or about what. His face is tight though, brows furrowed and nostrils pinched and Jonathan knows he’s upset about _something,_ but he can’t really work out why it’s Steve who’s mad.

“Why have you been avoiding me?” he hears himself say, and he hates the beers for loosening his tongue, his neediness.

Steve snorts and says in a low angry voice, “I’m the one avoiding you? You didn’t come see me at Christmas, man. I waited for you to show, but you were too busy making out with some guy in the parking lot at the grocery store.”

“Wait, you saw me…?” The panic returns, sliding around cold in his guts and it squeezes tight all the way around his body.

“Yeah, I saw you.” It’s a statement and an accusation. Jonathan can feel a headache coming on and it spurs him into defensiveness.

“So fuck it—you’ve been right all along: I'm not straight.” The words taste bitter and horrible on his tongue, and he’s hissing them because even though the music’s loud and no one’s looking at them, Jonathan can’t shake the feeling that someone might notice. Notice them, and this stupid argument, and the tension. Steve doesn't say anything, just _stares_ , and Jonathan lets out another long lasting sigh, disgusted. “And judging by how badly you’re taking it, can you blame me for not telling you?” he snaps. But it’s not a punch in the mouth or a hit to the face he gets, but the unexpected movement of Steve, swooping in and kissing him in the middle of the party, a ferocious possession.

Jonathan jerks back from the touch and the heat of Steve’s mouth almost instantly. There’s a cacophony in his head, the memories of Steve’s reaction as they woke up together, half naked and entangled in his bed in the grey light of a cold new year morning, and anger is coating everything. Even the taste of the kiss that he wants to draw in and memorize is seething, because it’s the only thing he's ever allowed himself to keep. That memory of the emptiness of the Harrington’s house after the party. The laughter as they drunkenly stumbled up the stairs to his room. The messy first kiss in the middle of the upstairs hall amongst the quietness of the too big empty house.

“No.” That’s all he can force out, all he can allow himself, and his legs are moving on instinct alone, running away. He watches Steve's expression morph and change, eyes narrowing and lips frowning, and that’s all Jonathan can take before he stumbles past oblivious strangers, hooting and hollering at him, a witness to Steve’s rejection.

Jonathan picks the lock to Danny’s room and hides there for the night, safe in the knowledge that he’s away for the weekend. There’s no sleep for him however, lying on his side, thinking over Steve’s anger, his reaction, the kiss. He carries himself through another day of classes half-asleep, even more unprepared for each lesson without his notes, books, and camera, all held prisoner back in his room. But he can’t return there, not with Steve in wait.

As he walks out of his last lecture of the day Steve, however, is waiting for him outside, hands in his pockets, hair over his eyes.

“I’m going home,” he tells him. “You can have your room back.”

There’s no accusation in his voice now, just sadness. Jonathan takes a step forward and Steve meets him with a step of his own, the keys to his room dangling heavy in his fingers.

“I miss you,” Steve says, dropping the keys into Jonathan’s waiting hand. “So maybe stop being such a moody asshole? I liked it when we were friends."

"You're the one who—," Jonathan instantly accuses.

The quad is deserted and unexpectedly, Steve cuts him off and ducks down, taking Jonathan’s face between his hands and places another kiss on his lips. This one is gentle, a goodbye, but sweet. Jonathan leans into it, lets himself be kissed, taking it all in and pushing all other thoughts out of his mind just for the moment.

Then, Steve steps back with a quick forced smile. “I know what I did,” he says. “And I’m sorry it took me so long to figure things out. See you around, Jonathan.”

Then, he’s gone.

—

The summer heat rolls in through his open window, and it makes him drowsy. It makes him even less able to unpack his shit properly and that ability was already impaired from the start because, _well,_ he’s still a teenaged boy after all. Jonathan stares at the odd pile of notes and books he’s managed to amass during his one year of higher learning so far, all thrown haphazardly into a box in a last minute rush to get home, and sighs. Soon he’ll have to make a decision about direction— they choose their election specialties starting second year—and he knows he has to start thinking seriously about his future.

But he’s not, and he hasn’t. He’s been thinking seriously about Steve instead, and he hasn’t stopped thinking about him since his whistle stop visit some weeks ago. It's problematic because it makes him blush and panic and he ends up taking photos like a demon, trying to work it out—trying to make the images in his head made _sense—_ which turns out well, because in the end he passes all his classes with flying colours, the comments scrawled in red on the top of his photography assignments being complimentary—amazed, even. It should be something that he’s proud of, but instead it just makes him think of Steve more, and more desperately.

He’s only been home three hours, but his mind is already at the Harrington's house, in Steve’s bedroom. Finally, he drops a pile of useless paper on his desk, kicks the box in frustration on the way out and makes his way across town. Knocking on the door prompts no response, but Jonathan knows it’s still early enough in the morning that Steve could be asleep. Instead, tenacious in his mission to talk to Steve, he finds a way inside. He rounds on the backyard, slipping in through the unlocked poolside patio doors that lead into the kitchen, and after that, Steve too is found. He’s lying in bed backwards with his head at the foot of it, staring up at the ceiling, eyes following the slow whirl of the ceiling fan.

“Hey,” Jonathan calls out from doorframe. "You didn't answer the door. I was knocking," he adds awkwardly, almost as an afterthought. He hasn’t been in here in a while and he almost feels like he’s made a mistake, like maybe he should have just waited outside and knocked on the front door a little bit harder, a little bit longer, because Steve drops his head to one side, gives him a long look, then turns back as if to ignore him. Jonathan feels himself deflate—four weeks of over thinking things melting into embarrassment—but at the last minute, Steve swings his legs off the edge bed and strides across the room in three large steps.

“Hey,” he parrots. "I thought you were those annoying door to door salespeople," he shrugs in way of explanation. "You know the ones that try to sell you useless shit like Tupperware and overpriced skin cream?"

He smells like cigarette smoke and the faded whiffs of perfumed shampoo and he doesn’t speak as his hands slide up Jonathan’s back slowly, a hug and an experimental testing of the water’s all in one go. Then, there is a hand on his neck and this time they both lean into the kiss, dry lips and nerves meeting in the middle. There are crickets in the dry heat of the day, and the quiet of the morning suburban street. Jonathan hears all this, but nothing registers right now beyond the hitch of Steve’s breath and the sound of sharp shock of want and need, hands running up the length of his spine and moving them so fast, so slow, onto his bed.

Steve crawls over him like every dream come true, and Jonathan has a flash of why it’s always been a dream and not a reality. He puts a hand between them, places it hard on Steve’s chest and pushes deep, digging the heel of his palm in.

“Do you want me to stop?” Steve says, a teasing note creeping into his voice as his hands slide under Jonathan’s shirt, his hips lowering against him. He smiles at the moan it elicits and Jonathan bits his lip, annoyed.

“You—,” He cuts himself off sharply, letting out a loud exhale and starts again. “Don’t start something. _Again_. That you won’t accept about yourself afterwards.” This is the third hardest thing he’s wanted to say to Steve. This is the hardest thing he’s actually said to Steve’s face. The second hardest is an unspoken truth— _I want you—_ and has been for a long time, and he’ll say it if Steve means all that he’s doing, all with his hands, his hips, his mouth. “Every single time you touch me, you know what happens—you start it, _every time_ , and every single time you swear you’re not gay.”

Jonathan hopes that Steve can hear what he’s asking underneath the blame. He hasn’t come up with a better way to say it in all the weeks he’s been thinking it.

Steve’s fingers keep dancing across Jonathan’s ribs, a press here and a slide there, slow and deliberate. In the end, he shrugs and simply says, “Would you accept that if you like someone that it doesn’t matter what labels you put on it?”

And maybe that’s the best they’ll get for now, but it answers everything.

“I want you,” Jonathan hears himself say, fiercely, and then there’s only one thing left to say, one thing left between them, but Steve’s rocking against him and they’re both hard and they’ve been waiting for one another for so long to get to this point. On focusing on each other all over again, on being fucked senseless, on mouths and tongues and naked skin. The sound Steve makes when he comes, the sight of him as he pushes into Jonathan and breaks him down, the gasp of his mouth clinging against him hard. It's a picture he’ll always want to remember of Steve, and not the picture he’s been trying to put into focus for so long about a friendship broken.

Jonathan wakes late in the day, the sun almost completely set, the cool night air drifting into the room over their nakedness. He shivers and pulls away from Steve, sitting up to find clothes. There’s a sour note in the memory of this, but he fights it away by poking Steve awake, motioning for him to get dressed too. There’s no running away here, not now.

“Come on,” he says, and Steve follows him blearily, unquestioningly. They lie on the lawn of his backyard, the grass crackling beneath their weight and look up at the stars in the clearest of skies. Steve yawns, cheeks stretching as his mouth opens and closes, and he reaches out to rest his fingers against Jonathan’s. Jonathan listens to his own breathing—to Steve’s—but nothing tells him they are broken this time. Nothing tells him that things are going to be the same.

“Did you mean it?" Steve then asks, fingers curling in the palm of Jonathan’s hand. “What you said earlier?"

“Of course,” Jonathan sighs, rolling his eyes, almost exasperated.

Steve smiles, a happy exhale as his lips spread wide. His laughter consumes the night, fingers squeezing against Jonathan’s tightly, his expression exuberant in the afterglow.

"Good," Steve says at long last. Just good. "Because I want you too.”

—


End file.
